King County, Seattle, and Bellevue Real Estate Blog

Last week I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with Lloyd Hara, the King County elected Assessor, and thought you would appreciate me relaying some of the information and insight I garnered from that opportunity.

The first thing I would like to say is that I was incredibly impressed with Mr. Hara. I took loads of notes about the inner workings of the King County Department of Assessments, but more than anything else I walked away thinking Mr. Hara was doing the absolute best he could given the systems and restraints he tries to overcome on a daily basis. Additionally, I'm a pretty good reader of character, and he certainly struck me as someone who tries to do the right thing.

Anyways, I was very impressed with Lloyd Hara.

I did walk away with an immense amount of insight, but I'll just pass along some of the most important stuff in regards to the King County Department of Assessments.

First and foremost, most people wrongfully place the blame on the Department of Assessments as to why their property taxes seem high. Let me make this clear... the Department of Assessments only determines the ASSESSED VALUE, not the amount of taxes.

But, in the realm of assessed value, many complain that their assessment is too high. There have certainly been instances of this being true in the last couple years as prices significantly dropped, but throughout my years in real estate I have found the assessed value of homes is generally less than market value. There is going to be a lag effect on the assessed value as a department that is being crunched by a shrinking budget and plagued by aging systems tries to keep up with the changes.

* If you are a homeowner that thinks their property is valued too high, then you can appeal the assessment. I plan to have a longer post about the process of doing so in the near future, but in the meantime you can start here. *

While I'm on the topic of appeals, you may be interested to know that appeals in 2009 were four times the amount of appeals in 2008. No surprise that property owners are not appealing and complaining when their properties are undervalued :)

One of the other interesting things I learned about some of the difficulties the department faces is that they are still using data systems from the 1970's. The problem arising here is that the system does not easily allow for unique information, which is one reason why property taxes are not 100% uniquely tailored for each property. Mr. Hara said repeatedly how he would like to improve the systems, but a shrinking budget just doesn't allow him to do so. Another way he wanted to improve things was getting the assessors better field technology allowing them to spend more time looking at houses, and thus being more accurate and timely in their assessments. Currently assessors use regular laptops with minimal battery life... something like an iPad with 10-12 hours of battery life would increase the amount of time they spend in the field for example.

Lastly, I think this tidbit about what Lloyd Hara has done with his time as the King County Assessor is insightful to how he is trying to do the right thing: the first thing he tackled upon taking over as Assessor was to improve the phone system. More specifically, he changed it so callers can actually get a real person on the phone instead of recordings. The next thing he did was improve the website to provide better tools and customer service for property owners.

I have a heck of a lot more information I could write about, but I'll call it quits there. If any of you are interested in personally talking more about this with me, then just give me a call at 425-289-1099.

- Robert Wasser: King County, Bellevue, and Seattle Real Estate News and Blog